Petshrimp.com Discussion Forum

Several months ago I bought a few (what I think is) ghost shrimp for my large goldfish tank and soon noticed some green gunk growing under one of them.
Worried that it may be some disease I Goggled it, and of course they were eggs.
So I set up a 10-gal tank with a nursery net thingie and tried to save/raise babies.
The glass pane (barely discernible on the upper left) is to reduce the water current from the the filter.
Here is one of the berried mamas.

At near the maximum magnification of my photography gear, here's a close up of a larva emerging from an egg under mama.
He just hung there for several minutes then quickly flitted away.
He probably didn't want to become a snack for mother.
Apparently newborn larvae can only float vertically (head down) in the water column and hope food floats by, but when danger approaches they can flit away VERY fast several inches.
It would be like me jumping across a football field in a microsecond.
Compare size of newborns to a dime.

I used a tube to suck the babies out of the main tank and transfer them into that hanging net-tank.
With the empty tube out of water I used a finger of my left hand to seal the tube.
Slowly move the other end of the tube near a larva.
Let finger go so water, and the larva, rush in.
Put finger back and transfer larva to hanging net-tank.
Let go of finger and water/larva rush out.

When they were all in the net-tank I fed them with Hikari First Bites many times a day.
Restricting the babies to a smaller area meant I could put in less food while still getting a high density of food particles - but the water supply and filter are for a full 10-gal tank for better water quality than if they were just in a small bowl.
There were 3 or 4 pregnant females in same 10-gal tank.
When the eggs of the first female hatched she mortally wounded one of her pregnant tank mates by attacking her neck.
Here she is dying before my eyes.
Even when she was too weak to stand up she kept her swimmerets moving to keep oxygen flowing over her eggs.

What is so weird is it's just a stupid little 25-cent feeder shrimp (so why should I care?) but it turned into a whole soap opera drama.
She soon died but I wanted to try to save her eggs, which looked ready to hatch since I could see eyes.

Moving fast I grabbed the tail of her dead body with a locking tweezers and positioned her above an air stone to oxygenate the eggs.
Those curved white lines you see below are bubbles moving over her body and the eggs.

You can tell she had not been dead long because her body was still translucent.
Later it turned white/pink.
In this close up of the same pic you can see baby eyes, very appreciative baby eyes.
The pic below was taken the day after she died; her body is turning opaque.
Note that most of the eggs have hatched though you can see a few eggs remain close to her belly.

See the remaining eggs under her swimmerets on the left?
Close up of same pic:

Top view of one of her beautiful kids.
I cheated on next two pics below by rotating them 90 degrees so they fit on the screen better. You can tell by the arched backs below that these guys have already been through a molt or two, but they need to molt more before they can walk on the ground.
Finally after about a week they can walk on the ground.

I've been doing this a few months now and have witnessed several egg hatchings and they frequently follow a molt, not always though.
Here is what remains after mom crawls out of her exoskeleton after outgrowing it.
This is the most mature one I've gotten a pic of so far.
This is my favorite pic.
I call it, "Take Me To Your Leader!"

I've tried to culture infusoria but fail so it's nice Hikari makes First Bites fry food.
I'll try again to culture infusoria; it may increase my dismal survival rate.
When the kids are a week old they start getting freshly hatched brine shrimp.

I've been doing this for a few months now and it is hard to get them to adulthood.
Out of the 200 or so larvae I've seen hatch I only got 4 near adulthood.
I had hydra infestations and those four became meal for a pearl gourami I put in the 10-gal tank to eradicate the hydra.

I thought the 4 shrimp were old enough to dodge the grouami.
I was wrong - but I did get rid of the hydra.

I got another 36 larvae going now and 3 more berried moms.
It's fun to wake up every morning and look for new kids floating around.
I enjoy this challenging hobby even though I'm not very good at it.
My family and friends think I'm nuts.

Great story and amazing photos! Thank you for sharing them.

Fantastic illustrated story! Could you comment on what camera/lighting you used for the extreme close-up shots?

7Enigma wrote: Could you comment on what camera/lighting you used for the extreme close-up shots?

Thanks.
About my gear and macro techniques:
Nikon D200 DSLR (it is best to set it to shoot RAW format if your camera can)
Trusty 30-year old Nikon micro Nikkor 105mm f2.8 lens
Nikon PB-6 bellows extension
One or two Nikon PK-13 auto extension rings

At these magnifications even a tiny vibration will blur the pic so . . .
I use a very heavy tripod, an aluminum Gitzo Series 3.
Some shots were hand held but the front of the lens was supported in two spots, pressing lens against glass and resting on my hand, see pic below.
I set the camera to mirror lock up, not all SLRs have this feature.
This prevents vibration from the camera's mirror flipping up during exposure. (Yes, at these magnifications even that can soften the focus.)
I have to press the shutter twice, first to lock up the mirror, again to take the exposure.
I use a wireless shutter release so I don't have to touch the camera, another vibration source.

The lighting for many shots is just a cheapo CFL from Home Depot in a cheapo aluminum fixtue placed behind the aquarium for back lighting.
Some shots are done with on-camera flash, but with the camera NOT parallel to the glass, which would result in bright reflections.

Only take pics when the shrimp is VERY close to the glass since sharpness falls off fast when looking through more water.
An example of this is that pic above of the dime and newly-hatched larvae.
I was looking into the top of the aquarium (no glass in the way) and about only 4 inches of water, and see how soft the focus was.
I try to use the middle apertures, which are most sharp like f8 or f11, but light falls off at high magnification so you need bright lights.
Granted, you can get greater depth of focus with smaller apertures like f22 or f32 but that introduces another problem; absolute sharpness suffers when apertures are extremely small.
Light bends slightly when it passes near something and when the aperture is smallest a larger percentage of the light must pass near the aperture blades, softening the focus a bit.
Oh and cleaning the lens and aquarium glass is a No Duh!

The pic below shows two extension rings between the lens and the camera body.
They give less magnification than the bellows can.
Such rings are not expensive since they have no glass.
They enlarge by just moving the lens further away.
You can use them with any lens to increase the magnification, although (resolution-wise) true macro lenses are designed to work best with them.
Another low-cost option if you have an SLR is a lens reversal ring.
They allow you to use your current lens backwards, which increases the magnification.
Results won't be as good as a real macro lens but I've read that they are a good value.

I currently have three berried females alone in the 10-gal nursery tank + whatever is left of around 40 larvae a week or two old in the net "tank" hanging in the 10-gal.
Last night i noticed another female was ready to hatch her eggs since several eggs were hanging down, and this morning I siphoned out 29 new larvae.
At first I thought they all came from this one female but they must have come from two females since one now has NO eggs left and, it looks like one of them is still carrying a few more eggs in there at 1:00 PM.
This disproves what I read once, that eggs only hatch at night and all eggs hatch in one night.

One mom molted so I'll let them both remain in the shrimp-only tank another day before sending them back into the community tank where their boyfriends live.
I think they are more vulnerable to attack right after molting.

I took these pics late last night.
It looks like several larvae were struggling to hatch at the same time.
It was quite amazing to watch.

The first pic was with the on-camera flash.
The next two are back lighting.

Your photos are absolutely amazing. I have Ghost Shrimp (Palaemonetes paludosus in this area...supposedly) in most of my tanks and while I have sponge filters or prefilters in there I've never had any develop into shrimplets. I'm not trying, but I've always been told it can't be done for various reasons. One reason commonly cited is the need for a brackish water larval cycle which I know isn't true as they are common around here (Palm Harbor, FL. USA) in freshwater only ponds.

Great pictures!...
(Feeling compelled to comment in that sense.)


Often I just sit in front of my tanks with a magnifying glass. I'm always jealous of pictures that surpass this experience.

I've seen a number of reports online regarding Asolene Spixi snails as being effective hydra removers. They would be less of a threat to the young shrimp than a gourami.